Here’s how to make your avocado even more craveable: Grill it

Who says you can’t cook an avocado? We’re so accustomed to using it raw, for that silky texture it brings to sand- wiches, salads, grain bowls, tacos, smoothies, ice creams, gazpachos and more, but rarely do you see dishes that involve heating it. (A wonder- ful exception is the fried-avo- cado taco, a thing of beauty I first tried at Torchy’s Tacos in Austin, Texas.)

Avocados take particularly well to grilling, indoors or out. Cut them in half, scoop out the pit — but leave on the peel — and char them for just a few minutes on the cutside, then turn them over and turn down the heat to warm them through. If you’ve done this on a char- coal grill (or a gas grill with wood chips), they soak up some smoke flavor beautifully, but either way, their flesh becomes even more custardy with the application of heat.

How to use them, then? Any of the ways you would use a raw avocado, for sure, but I liked the looks of a recipe in the new “VBQ: The Ultimate Vegan Barbecue Cookbook” by Nadine Horn and Jörg Mayer (The Experiment, 2018). Horn and Mayer top their avocado halves with a duo of beans (lima and kidney) quickly stewed in a bourbon-spiked barbecue sauce. They start with their own from-scratch sauce, but I cheated with store-bought.

You could invert this, of course, and serve cool slices of avocado over these sweet, tart and boozy beans, sprinkled with a cucumber garnish. But if you love avocado as much as I do, why not make it the focus?